The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Acknowledgements

Introduction: Return to the Crime Scene
by Mike Ashley

Archimedes and the Scientific Method
by Tom Holt

Something to do with Diana
by Steven Saylor

Eyes of the Icon
by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

Night of the Snow Wolf
by Peter Tremayne

Jettisoned
by Deirdre Counihan

A Fiery Death
by Ian Morson

Hide and Seek
by Tony Pollard

The Fourth Quadrant
by Dorothy Lumley

Brodie and the Regrettable Incident
by Anne Perry

Forty Morgan Silver Dollars
by Maan Meyers

Trafalgar
by Charles Todd

Dead of Winter
by Richard A. Lupoff

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

Copyright Acknowledgements

With the exception of the story below, all of the stories are copyright © 2011 by the individual authors, are original to this anthology and are printed with the authors’ permission.

“Brodie and the Regrettable Incident” © 1998 by Anne Perry was first published in
Murder, They Wrote II
, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell and Martin H. Greenberg (New York, Boulevard Books, 1998) as “Brodie and the Regrettable Incident of the French Ambassador”. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, MBA Literary Agents Ltd, London.

Introduction

Return to the Crime Scene

The stories in this anthology cover over four thousand years of crime. We travel from the Bronze Age of 2300
BC
to the eve of the Second World War, passing through ancient Greece and Rome, the Byzantine Empire, medieval Venice and seventh-century Ireland, before heading for Britain and the United States.

All except one of these stories are brand new, written especially for this anthology. This is my fifteenth anthology of historical crime and mystery fiction (for those interested there is a full list on the ‘Also in the series’ page), and this time I wanted to feature longer stories. This allows the author to concentrate on the historical setting, character and mindset of the period, so that not only do these stories present fascinating crimes and puzzles, but you also get to know the people and their world in more detail. There are twelve stories in this volume compared to the usual twenty or twenty-five; they are almost like mini-novels, allowing a greater understanding of the time.

I’ve also broadened the coverage. Rather than focus solely on a mystery and its solution, here we have a broader range of crimes and a wider variety of those trying to solve them. Hence you will find, among others, a young girl in Bronze Age Britain trying to understand whether a series of deaths over a period of time were accidental or deliberate; an icon-painter in ancient Byzantium, suddenly out of work when all icons are banned, who becomes embroiled in a case of deception; a priest-finder trying to track down attempted regicides; Charles Babbage and the young Ada Byron trying to crack a coded message and stop a master criminal; and New York detectives on the lookout for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Your guides are twelve of the leading writers in historical crime fiction who are about to bring the past alive. Let us return to the scene of the crime.

–
Mike Ashley

Archimedes and the Scientific Method

Tom Holt

Tom Holt is best known for his many humorous fantasy novels, which began with
Expecting Someone Taller
(1987) and include
Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?
(1988),
Paint Your Dragon
(1996) and
The Portable Door
(2003) – the last heralding the start of a series featuring the magic firm of J. Wellington Wells from Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera
The Sorcerer
. But Holt is also a scholar of the ancient world and has written a number of historical novels including
The Walled Garden
(1997),
Alexander at the World’s End
(1999) and
Song for Nero
(2003).

The following story, which is the shortest in the anthology and so eases us in gently, features one of the best known of the ancient Greek scientists and mathematicians, Archimedes. He lived in the third century
BC
in the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, under the patronage of its ruler Hieron II. It is a shame that the one enduring image we all have of Archimedes is of him leaping out of his bath shouting “Eureka”, meaning “I have found it.” But it does encapsulate how Archimedes operated. When presented with a scientific problem he applied his whole self to it using scientific principles, many of which he had propounded. Archimedes unified much scientific theory into a coherent body of thought which allowed him to apply what he regarded as the scientific method. It probably made him the world’s first forensic investigator.

“No,” I told him. “Absolutely not.”

You don’t talk like that to kings, not even if they’re distant cousins, not even if they’re relying on you to build superweapons to fight off an otherwise unbeatable invader, not even if you’re a genius respected throughout the known world. It’s like the army. Disobeying a direct order is the worst thing you can possibly do, because it leads to the breakdown of the machine. You’ve got to have hierarchies, or you get chaos.

He looked at me. “Please,” he said.

He, for the record, was King Hiero the Second of Syracuse; my distant cousin, my patron and my friend. Even so. “No,” I said.

“Forget about the politics,” he said. “Just think of it as an intellectual problem. Come on,” he added, and that little-boy look somehow found its way back on to his face. Amazing, how he can still do that, after the life he’s lived. “You’ll enjoy it, you know you will. It’s a challenge. You like challenges. Isn’t that what it’s all about, finding answers to questions?”

“I’m busy,” I told him. “Really. I’m in the middle of calculating the square root of three. If I stop now—”

“The what of three what?”

“I’ll lose track and have to start all over again. Four years’ work, wasted. I can’t possibly drop that just to help out with some sordid little diplomatic issue.”

One of these days, people tell me, one of these days I’ll get myself into real trouble talking to important people like that. Don’t be so arrogant, people tell me. Who do you think you are, anyhow?

“Archimedes.” He wasn’t looking at me any more. He was staring down at his hands, folded in his lap. It was then I noticed something about him that I’d never realized before. He was getting old. The bones of the huge hands stood out rather more than they used to, and his wrists were getting thin. “No,” I said.

“You never know,” he went on, “it might lead to a great discovery. Like the cattle problem or the thing with the sand. Those were stupid little problems, and look where they ended up. For all you know, it could be your greatest triumph.”

I sighed. You think somebody knows you, and then they say something, and it’s obvious they don’t. “No,” I said. “Sorry, but that’s final. Get one of your smart young soldiers on to it. That Corinthian we had dinner with the other evening; sharp as a razor, that one; I’m sure he’d relish the chance to prove himself. You want someone with energy for a job like this. I’m so lazy these days I can hardly be bothered to get out of bed in the morning.”

He looked at me, and I could see I’d won. I’d left him no alternative but to use threats – do this or it’ll be the worse for you – and he’d decided he didn’t want to go there. In other words, he valued our friendship more than the security of the nation.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

*

The extraordinary thing about human beings is their similarity. We’re so alike. Dogs, cows, pigs, goats, birds come in a dazzling array of different shapes and sizes, while still being recognizable as dogs, cows, pigs, goats, birds. Human beings scarcely vary at all. The height difference between the unusually short and the abnormally tall is trivial compared with other species. The proportions are remarkably constant – the head is always one-eighth of the total length, the width of the outstretched arms is always the same as the length of a single stride, and the stride is so uniform that we can use it as an accurate measurement of distance. Human beings have two basic skin colours, three hair colours, and that’s it. Just think of all the colours chickens come in. It’s a miracle we can ever tell each other apart.

That said, I can’t stand Romans. They’re practically identical to us in size, shape, skin and hair colour, and facial architecture. Quite often you can’t tell a Roman from a Syracusan in the street – no surprise, when you think how long Greeks and Italians have shared Sicily. I’ve known Romans who can speak Greek so well you wouldn’t know they weren’t born here; not, that is, unless you listen to what they actually say.

It’s ridiculous, therefore, to take exception to a subsection of humanity that’s very nearly indistinguishable from my own subsection; particularly foolish when you consider that I’m supposed to be a scientist, governed by logic rather than emotion, and by facts susceptible to proof rather than intuition and prejudice. Still, there it is. I can’t be doing with the bastards, and that’s all there is to it.

Partly, I guess, my dislike stems from the fact that they’re taking over the world, and nobody seems willing or able to stop them. Hiero tried, and he couldn’t do it. They smashed his Carthaginian allies, and he was forced to snuggle up and sign a treaty with the Roman smile and the Roman hobnailed boot. Not sure which of those I detest most, by the way. Probably the smile.

Needless to say, the problem Hiero had just blackmailed me into investigating was all about Romans. One Roman in particular. His name was Quintus Caecilius Naso, diplomatic attaché to the Roman delegation to the court of King Hiero, and what he’d done to make trouble for Syracuse (and perplexity for me) was to turn up, extremely dead, in a large storage jar full of pickled sprats, on the dockside at Ostia, when he should have been alive and healthy in the guest quarters of the royal palace at Syracuse.

Quintus Caecilius Naso – why Romans have to have three names when everybody else manages perfectly well with one is a mystery to me – was, at the time of his death, a thirty-six-year-old army officer, from a noble and distinguished family, serving as part of a delegation engaged in negotiating revisions to the treaty Hiero had been bounced into signing twenty years ago; in other words, he was here to bully my old friend into making yet more concessions, and I know for a fact that Hiero was deeply unhappy about the situation. However, he’d managed to claw back a little ground, and it looked as though there was a reasonable chance of lashing together a compromise and getting rid of the Romans relatively painlessly, when Naso suddenly disappeared.

I never met the man, but by all accounts he wasn’t the disappearing sort. Far too much of him for that. He wasn’t tall, but he was big; a lot of muscle and a lot of fat was how people described him to me, just starting to get thin on top, a square jaw floating on a bullfrog double-chin; incongruously small hands at the end of arms like legs. His party trick was to pick up a flute-girl with one hand, lift her up on his shoulder and take her outside for a relatively short time. He was never drunk and never sober, he stood far too close when he was talking to you, and he had, by all accounts, a bit of a temper.